Cybill, Karl Should Pick Better Projects

TELEVISION

It's wonderful to have Cybill Shepherd and Karl Malden back on television doing something besides commercials for hair coloring and travelers checks.

Or so I thought. Then I actually watched the TV movies responsible for their return. Wonderful may be too strong a word. Even ''good'' may be pushing it for Malden.

Both actors should have heeded the advice they offer viewers in their commercials. In Malden's ads for a popular brand of traveler's checks he warns us, ''Don't leave home without them!''

But Malden left home without a decent script when he made Back to the Streets of San Francisco (9 to 11 tonight, WESH-Channel 2). This one needs to go Back to the Drawing Board.

Shepherd tells us she spends a bit more for a certain hair coloring ''because I'm worth it,'' and she's right. But isn't she also worth a believable role?

She doesn't get it in Memphis (8 to 10 tonight, TNT), which is a better advertisement for her hair coloring than it is for her abilities as an executive producer and screenwriter.

She helped do both those jobs, in addition to filling the starring role, but only in grade school do you get an A for effort.

Memphis, set in 1957 amid integration tensions, is a movie you want to like. It's evocatively filmed on location in and around Memphis, Tenn., Shepherd's hometown. It's based on the novel September, September by Shelby Foote, beloved narrator of the documentary The Civil War. (He didn't work on the screenplay.) It puts Shepherd in a highly sympathetic role.

Unfortunately, the role is also thoroughly incredible.

Shepherd, looking very '50s in ankle-length wraparound skirts and short-sleeve white blouses, plays a high-priced hooker who hooks up with two lowlifes. Together they cook up a get-rich-quick plan to kidnap the grandson of a wealthy black Memphis businessman.

That much is believable. Where the movie loses me is after the boy is snatched and taken to a musty hideout in the sticks. This supposedly hardened prostitute then suddenly, inexplicably, turns to mush, bonding to the boy faster than Super Glue.

It just doesn't wash, maybe because Shepherd isn't terribly convincing as a hooker to begin with.

Another puzzlement about this movie is why it was called Memphis. That suggests the city is somehow integral to the story, but we see very little of Memphis; the story could have happened anywhere.

Strong acting may keep you watching when the script falters. Richard Brooks (Law and Order) plays the father of the kidnapped boy. John Laughlin, a strapping Memphis native who played opposite Kathleen Turner in Crimes of Passion, gives a rousing, comical performance as Shepherd's hunky, if dimwitted, lust interest.

Not even the stolid presence of Oscar and Emmy winner Malden can redeem Back to the Streets of San Francisco, a dreary spinoff of the police series that wasn't all that electrifying when Malden starred in it with Michael Douglas from 1972 to '77.

Poor Malden. After the first few minutes, in which a priest is murdered in a confessional and his killer gunned down by one of Hollywood's Cover Girl detectives (Debrah Farentino, Equal Justice), you may well wonder . . . what will he do?

The answer is . . . wait. A more apt title for this movie would have been What About Steve?

The movie shamelessly teases us with the groundless hope that Douglas - who played Lt. Mike Stone's (Malden) partner Steve Keller in the series but has since gone on to big-screen stardom - may actually appear.

The camera lingers on photos of Steve in home and office. We see Mike making dinner plans with Steve on the phone, then Mike being stood up at the restaurant. When Steve is reported missing, we see Mike babbling incoherently in his sleep - Steve . . . Steve . . . Steve.

Mike is the last person in San Francisco to figure out that Steve is not going to show up. But you can't blame him for hoping. There's nothing else of much interest going on - lame subplots about interoffice politics and a paroled killer stalking Mike for purposes of revenge.